Town of Ulster address complaints about police firing range

TOWN OF ULSTER, N.Y. -- Town Supervisor James Quigley says an acoustical engineer will be sought to conduct tests at the town police firing range on Ulster Landing Road in response to noise complaints from neighbors.

At a Town Board meeting Thursday, town officials acknowledged the complaints about daily target practice by town police and other law-enforcement agencies.

"In campaigning, we had stopped at every house in the area," said Councilman John Morrow. "It's a sparsely populated area, and there area maybe four or five people affected; it's not a tremendous number of people. But the four or five people that we spoke to all expressed the same concern."

Officials said the complaints led to a shooting schedule, but Stewart Dean, who lives about 2,000 feet from the range, said the impact of up to several hundred rounds per hour has kept him from being able to enjoy his property in peace. While Dean spoke, he played about five minutes of a 20-minute recording of shots being fired at the rate of several dozen per minute.

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"I very much want the town police, perhaps the county and (Kingston) city police to practice because they cannot safely discharge their responsibilities if they haven't practiced using the firearms," Dean said. "But what's happened is that this has been going on for months, day after day, two to six days per week."

Town Police Chief Anthony Cruise could not immediately provide information about the number of agencies that use the facility.

"It's not open to the whole Hudson Valley," he said. "It is open to all Ulster County police agencies ... because we share services economically to save money.

"They'll have maybe six members of a police department there at a time at the range going to shoot," Cruise said. "They are getting skills and training to make them more efficient and better. "They don't just go down there ... (to) make as much noise as they can to aggravate people."

Cruise said the range closes at 5 p.m. most days but occasionally is used until 8 p.m. He said it seldom is used on weekends.